Oh well!

They know that a first cause is just as inconceivable as is the point where space has an end … [I]f that first state began to be causal only at a certain time, then something must have changed it at that time for its inactivity to have ceased. But then something came about, a change occurred, and we must ask at once about its cause, in other words, about a change which preceded it, and again we find ourselves on the ladder of causes up which we are whipped by the inexorable law of causality higher and higher, ad infinitum, ad infinitum … the law of causality is therefore not so obliging as to allow itself to be used like a cab which we dismiss after we reach our destination. … [Y]our theme will now have the name of ‘the Absolute’: this has a foreign, devent and aristocratic ring: and we know best what can be done by Germans assuming an air of superiority. … You shout (and we accompany you)”: ‘The Absolute, confound it, this must exist, otherwise there would be nothign at all!’ (With this you bang on the table.) But where does this come from? ‘Silly question! Haven’t I said that it was the Absolute?’

and

Minimal principles are much beloved by physicists as a slick way to derive results already known to be true.

Spinoza, who always boasts of proceeding more geometrico, has actually done so more than he himself knew. For what to him was certain and setteld from an immediate perceptive apprehension of the nature of the world, he tries to demonstrate logically and independently of this knowledge. But of course he arrives at the intended result predetermined by him, only by taking as the starting-point concepts arbitrarily made by him … and allowing himself in the demonstration all the freedom of choice for which the nature of those wide-ranging concepts afforded convenient opportunity.

(Both quotations from Schopenhauer, both quoted by Conant in “On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy”.)

i was thinking maybe it was just a mal ingenue.

If that makes sense…on my way out here.

It’s deeper than quasi-aesthetic; for Leibniz, having a decision between two equally good worlds be a coin flip means it might as well be a brute unintelligible fact about the world. (This is a point of disagreement between Leibniz and many other philosopher-theologians.)

I agree, and that’s the fallacy most scholars fall into when associating Spinoza with Heidegger, or even Leibniz. Heidegger actually challenged Spinoza, transforming the one-substance system into a metaphysical totality. Both contend that existence acts as an a priori agent to embodiment. At what point mind-body separate is not as important as WHY mind-body separate. The “why” differentiates Spinoza from the seemingly proto-Nazi Heidegger (contemporary scholars quetions associations between his Nazism and past philosophical tracts)…and there’s the anachronism arguments.

Leibniz and many other scholars sorta forget that PSR applies to PSR itself. Perhaps that’s why he’s freaking out at the end of this post. Can’t wait to read the conclusion!

The PSR ensures that there is only one best possible world. Think of it like this. Suppose there were a tie between two equally good worlds; some philosophers and theologians thought there could be a tie. Then God’s decision to create would be arbitrary, because God would have picked that world without a good reason to do so. There would be no explanation as to why God created that particular world. The PSR rules that out.

Whence the insistence on a “good” reason? If God broke the tie by flipping a coin, we have a reason why he chose the world he did; and at the same time, we know that the world could not be better than it is. Thus we have no grounds for complaint except the quasi-aesthetic one that one of the reasons for the way things are is arbitrary.

Minimal principles are much beloved by physicists as a slick way to derive results already known to be true.

And it seems especially relevant when you’re talking about one of the creators of calculus…

Awhile back I wrote this piece, based solely on a reading of the “Discourse on Method”, arguing that Descartes might as well have been an atheist, given the shabbiness of his metaphysics and theology in that book. I actually got quite a nice response from an actual Cartesianist, explaining that I’d overstated my case.

I’ve seen it argued that PSR-type metaphysics is the wishfulness specifically of engineers and experimentalists whose tasks of discovery and invention (and claims to Truth) are made easier if the world they’re investigating was engineered by God — their task simply becomes reverse engineering. In Daniel Dennett’s criticism of Gould Panglossian evolutionary biology is in fact linked to the attempt to produce artificial intelligence.

Shorter Moby Dick: You come at the king, you best not miss.